The red smear across the double’s left eye didn’t wipe away. The creature didn’t have a free hand to wipe it.
Its left arm was hanging ready to block, its fingers half-curled. At the same time, its right hand remained welded to Len’s crushed wrist in the unmoving clamp of Hookhold. The blood and spit ran down its man-made cheek in a slow, dark bead, dripping off its jawline onto the collar of its clean green coat.
The creature’s right eye—cold, clear, and perfectly focused—stared down into Len’s face with a sudden, terrifying shift in its expression. The false familial warmth was gone. The calm, reasonable clerk had vanished. What remained was the raw, plain logic of a country enforcement mandate that had identified an insoluble error in its records.
“You’re nineteen years old,” the creature said. Its voice had dropped into a flat, metal flat voice that sounded like iron gears grinding against lead thin wedges. “You have five baseline improvements. You have an unreduced compound fracture in your left forearm bone and radius, four fractured wrist bones in your right wrist, an acute lateral joint cord rupture in your right ankle, and severe lung deep bruise from inhaling white-hot sulfur vapor.”
